Let me get this out of the way first. I am going to be fine. This is not a great situation, but it is not a dangerous one either, more inconvenience than emergency, which is exactly why we rerouted to Rikitea in the first place. The plan was that even if we lost both motor and sail, we would still drift in the right general direction. The plan is doing its job. The good news is that we have both, motor and sail, just both of them on a shorter leash than usual.

Today is a day for arithmetic. There is no wind, none, the kind of nothing that flattens the sea into a dimpled sheet and makes you feel like you are crossing a parking lot. So I have been leaning on the engine, which is the right call now rather than later. I have drawn a hard line at five jerry cans of reserve, those do not get touched unless something changes that I cannot predict. The math, written out, looks like this: about eight hundred and fifty miles to go, about three hundred miles of fuel range under the engine, which leaves about five hundred miles to be solved by sail or current.

The current and what little wind exists are both going my way, which is the small mercy of this neighborhood. Even with nothing up, we are still moving at about three knots, which sounds slow until you remember that three knots in the right direction beats six knots in the wrong one. If the breeze shows up at all, four to six is in reach, maybe seven on a good day. Realistically I would take five and call it a fine afternoon. The forecast is more or less three to four days of not much. But the reserve fuel comes back into play once we are inside about a hundred and fifty miles of Gambier, so when you really strip it down, the actual unknown is closer to two hundred and fifty miles. The difference between covering that at three knots versus six is a day and change. That is the whole shape of the problem.

I have to remind myself, every now and then, that I set out to sail, and I set out to circumnavigate, and this is what those two sentences look like in practice. Days where the wind does not show up are not a bug, they are part of the chapter. So no stress, just a careful eye on the gauge, a slow steady three knots in the right direction, and the steady patient sky overhead, going about its business. And for what it is worth, the smoothies are still happening. There is mango aboard, the blender is willing, and life today is good.